Free London Triptych by Jonathan Kemp Page B

mule. “He-whore, to use the vernacular.” He paused, before adding, with a salacious wink, “And what I wouldn’t give to find your number in there.”
    I had already told Edward stories about my whoring back home, and he said to Alana straight away, “Well, you won’t have to wait too long, darling, I’m sure.”
    I looked startled enough for Edward to say, “You’ve gotta earn your keep somehow, sweetheart. You’re eating me out of house and fucking home.”
    It was inevitable, really, that I would pick up where I had left off. I didn’t want to get a job, and the dole could never provide enough money to live on. There was always a new club or a private viewing or a party or an opening to go to. And Edward was always broke. Pretty soon I was earning what to me seemed vast amounts of money—500 pounds a week, sometimes—which I was spending as rapidly as it appeared—on clothes, drugs, and going out every single night and partying till sunrise. I wrapped myself inside the moods and colours of this city. I licked it as if it were the white-powdered edge of a credit card. I learnt to move through it by following men. And by doing outcalls. There was one man who owned a lock-up in the arches on Pancras Road and who paid me to go around and whip him with chains as he lay face-down, naked, on a thin bare mattress on the floor. In the house of a dwarfish old queen in North Finchley, all scalloped curtains and violent clashing florals, I waited while he took his yapping pooch outside to lock it in the car. When he returned he informed me in a high-pitched clip that he wanted to watch me cum across a photograph of his father. In Willesden Green an old man of seventy-five would enquire after experiences of canings at school, and I would invent stories of having my buttocks exposed in front of the entire school and being whipped senseless. When he was sufficiently frenzied he would remove a slipper from his briefcase and use it to redden my behind. In a flat in Pimlico, a man wanted to be chased around the room whilst wearing fishnet stockings and whooping like a banshee. Every now and then I would have to rugby-tackle him to the floor (which made him shriek even louder) and then I would let him wriggle free and start the whole thing again. I regularly visited a man in Hammersmith whose flat was piled floor to ceiling with books, and who simply wanted me to do his ironing naked whilst he sat in another room doing paperwork; on one occasion, he got me to clean out the thick crust of limescale from his bath with spirit of salts, wearing nothing but a pair of pink marigolds. In a flat in Earl’s Court, I was fucking a client when his boyfriend walked in, having come back earlier than expected. He had a bottle of wine in his hand, which he immediately smashed against the doorjamb, running toward us with the jagged bottle neck raised above his head, shouting, “You fucking cunt!” We moved in time to avoid the glass, which tore into the pillow on which our heads had been lying. Feathers everywhere. I didn’t stick around to be paid. Another time, a man booked me to be his boyfriend’s birthday present. I had to go to a pub in Camberwell and pretend to pick him up, and then the three of us would go back to their flat for a threesome. The birthday boy was very drunk and very effeminate and disappeared into the bedroom the minute we arrived back at the house, whilst the other chopped out lines of coke on the Conran coffee table. After we had taken a line each he picked up a camcorder and handed it to me. He pulled a rubber sheet from underneath the sofa and unfolded it, laying it out flat and standing on it. Then he took his small and brutally circumcised cock out of his fly, spat into his hand, and started wanking furiously. At this point, the birthday boy glided back in, naked but for a square of chiffon, which he wafted around like Isadora Duncan with her scarf as he danced, lost to his own imaginings, lost in being